Minerva McGonagall and the Cursed Parchment
by UnpredictableW1tch
Summary: Minerva McGonagall finds a rather interesting piece of parchment left behind after one of her classes. Normally she wouldn't be interested in her student's rubbish. But this time around, it turned out to be very intriguing indeed.


Minerva McGonagal and the Cursed Parchment

Inspired by prompt 367: Minerva McGonagall finds some parchment that looks to be blank, but is definitely not. From .com.

Minerva McGonagal was the Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She was Head of Gryffindor House. And head of the Hogwarts Transfiguration Department. To name just a few of her titles.

She was most certainly not a maid.

It was her job to teach students, not clean up after them, for the love of Merlin.

So it was with great impatience and disapproval that she snatched up the crumpled piece of parchment that one of her students had so carelessly left tossed on one of the back row desks.

On any other occasion a student left something like that after them, Minerva would throw whatever it was in the rubbish bin immediately. She wouldn't think about it overmuch. Whether it was supposedly important or not She usually didn't check. If it was so important, its owner should have known better than to leave it behind them, was her usual opinion.

In that particular instance, however, she hesitated. And instead of dropping it in the bin, as she ought to have done, she carried it back to her desk with her.

Her curiosity had been piqued.

If memory served her correctly, as it always did, it had been Madeline Barton and Andrea Moran who had sat there in the last class of the day. Minerva usually separated them. But doing so had slipped her mind at the beginning of the lesson.

When she had remembered to part them, she was surprised to find that they hadn't been causing trouble. So she left them be.

Ordinarily, Minerva did not approve of going through the private belongings or correspondence of others. Though she often found herself making exceptions when it came to those two. Entirely because it more often than not turned out to be in the interest of public safety. Or her own sanity.

And if she wasn't above using the safety of her students and colleagues as an excuse to occasionally check up on the niece of a good friend, well, no one else ever had to know.

When she reached her desk she sat and began to carefully unravel the parchment from the complicated bird shape it had been folded up into. What she had originally taken to be a haphazard crumple was actually a very artfully constructed parrot, if she wasn't mistaken.

She must admit she was a little surprised by the artistry of it. Minerva hadn't thought either of the girls were of a temperament to sit down and learn origami in their spare time.

When it was finally laid out flat on the table in front of her, Minerva was even more surprised to discover that it was blank. Not a single drop of ink dotted its surface.

At first glance, it looked completely unused.

Upon closer inspection, she realised that couldn't be the case. Minerva could quite clearly see the crinkles and creases from where it had been folded, unfolded, crumpled, and refolded many times over. The ware and boxing along the edges of the parchment told of it being lent on and carried around. There were a few places where she could just make out a letter here and there. As though someone had pressed down too hard while they were writing and made indents into the page.

When she saw that, it was pretty easy to guess what they'd done to the page.

But that only made the entire situation more worrisome than if they'd scrawled some experimental and dangerous spells across it. Like she had confiscated from them only a month ago.

"Good Lord, why would they bother with a concealment charm on notes they were passing in class?" she muttered to herself, as genuine worry and apprehension settled in her chest.

There was nothing else for it. She had to find out what they were up to this time.

There was enough for them all to be dealing with, what with that hateful woman from the Ministry poking around, without those girls doing something irredeemably stupid as well.

It seemed that whatever this was, it was in the best interests of everyone, Andrea and Madeline included, for her to discover the parchment's contents and put a stop to it. They appeared to be severely underestimated what Delores Umbridge was capable of. All of the students were. Minerva would prefer if they were not disabused of that ignorance until long after the woman had left the school for good.

Her only option was to break the enchantment and hope they weren't planning to do anything before dinner. Or that it wasn't some scheme to blow up Severus' office. Again. Or a toilet. Again.

Or steal from the potions stores. Again.

Or cover the Great Hall in slime or permanent paint. They were determined to succeed in that. No matter how many attempts Minerva foiled. Filch would go positively ballistic if they ever did, and that was not something Minerva had the patience for.

Unfortunately for Minerva, her least well behaved students also tended to be among the most talented in her house. Like Potter and Black had been. And the Weasley twins. Don't even get her _started_ on the twins. They were becoming increasingly likely to cause her an aneurysm before their last year was over.

She just had terrible luck when it came to ill behaved children who were too clever for their own good. They just 'got bored', and decided to entertain themselves by causing as much trouble as possible.

Andrea and Madeline were no exceptions.

She tried every standard counter charm she knew of to try and gain access to the information on the parchment. But not a single one of them worked. So she moved onto all of the advanced and unusual counter spells that came to mind instead. Not one of them worked either.

That fact alone made her decision to call in their parents to discuss what they got up to in their spare time.

Why on earth would they require concealment charms more advanced than NEWT level? How had they even mastered the charm?

It was one she had see a few times before. And in her experience it was quite a tricky spell indeed. They'd figured out how to cast a concealment spell that would only lift with the utterance of a specific password or phrase.

Despite herself, Minerva was quite a bit impressed. It was a magic beyond the talents of most fully qualified witches and wizards. Not to mind two sixth years.

Impressed or not, she still muttered to herself, "Damn them," as she moved on to trying revealing spells intended for cursed rather than charmed objects, demanding of the parchment, "Reveal your secrets."

It was a standard spell for such cursed objects, which she figured couldn't hurt for a start. Even if nothing else 'standard' had worked yet.

Miraculously, it did work. Well, not completely. But it was exponentially more effective than anything else she'd tried thus far. Words began to form on the page, as though an invisible hand was writing along the battered sheet before her eyes. Ink curved across the page in a slanted, elegant scrawl she recognised, but couldn't place to an owner.

 _Nice try, but terribly predictable, Professor. I expected better from you._

That downright confused her. The tone was one she was all too familiar with. Combined with the script, she could easily guess who the author was. But why, exactly, was Gabriel Bennet's handwriting scrawling out aggravatingly amused taunts at her on a piece of parchment she found on Andrea's desk? She couldn't begin to guess at the reason. But she doubted it could be good for anyone.

 _I'm insulted you thought I wouldn't have prepared for that one, Professor. Honestly, so offended. What did I do to be so hugely underestimated?_

That careless, loopy writing was unmistakably Ms. Moran's.

So, apparently, Andrea _was_ in on it as well. Whatever _it_ was. And has spent probably the entirety of her Transfiguration class passing notes with Mr. Bennet. And they had cursed their parchment to be offended on their behalf if anyone didn't try hard enough to read said notes.

It was ridiculous. But so was Andrea more often than Minerva would have liked.

So she wasn't finding it too hard to believe.

That didn't stop her becoming ever more disturbed as this was revealed.

Gabriel Bennet and Andrea Moran had never had a conventional student relationship. They were not friends. Nor could she call them enemies. Rivals, perhaps. They could swing from aggression to laughter at the drop of a hat. But she never thought they saw eye to eye.

Gabriel Bennet, she knew, had caused Severus more than his share of trouble. Though not even he had been able to prove the young man guilty of any infractions.

She shuddered to think of what they might achieve if they put their heads together. They were loose cannons at the best of times. And their friends weren't at all far behind them in brains, talent, or their taste for mischief.

She didn't want to think of what the school would endure if that kind of joining of forces to came to be.

Thoughts of what the five of them could get up to together renewed her determination to find out what they had written on the parchment. But despite her rejuvenated vigour, she had little success. Her efforts were only measured in the snide little comments that kept appearing in the two students' handwriting.

She had a sneaking suspicion that they got more sarcastic and vicious the closer she came to their password. Likely in an attempt to distract and enrage her. She also had a feeling their tactics were working.

Sooner than she would ever admit, she became too frustrated to continue. She shoved the paper off her desk and dropped her head into her hands defeatedly.

"Merlin's saggy left ball," she cursed under her breath. Hoping no students would be walking close enough to hear her.

When had keeping her students from committing acts of extraneous rule breaking become so difficult? She'd had such a good run of it ever since Potter and Black graduated. But then this new lot of students had come along and invented their own, practically un-removable, slime bombs. And worse.

She'd thought she had enough on her plate when Harry Potter began attending the school. Then he went and nearly killed himself during his first flying lesson. And she knew it would only get worse from there.

And that it did. If there was something terribly dangerous going on at Hogwarts, you could be guaranteed those three would get involved. Somehow. Every. Single. Time.

If it was only one group of them, Minerva was sure she would have been able to keep an eye on them. But she wasn't so lucky. She had the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan. She had Ms. Moran and Ms. Barton. She had Potter, the youngest Weasley boy, and Ms. Granger. And wasn't that last trio a shot out of the blue? She never thought Hermione Granger would be someone she would have to keep tabs on. But, Merlin, was she wrong about that.

She was just glad that Bennet, Chase and Maraxis weren't in her house. Minerva could only handle so many pathological rule breakers at a time.

She was already severely outnumbered by the tricksters she had in her own house.

With a heavy sigh, Minerva composed herself. When she sat up straight she immediately regretted her childish outburst. Even if no one had been witness to it, Minerva was disappointed in herself for devolving to the state that a piece of paper drover her to distraction.

When she stood to retrieve the parchment, she was determined to actually throw it away this time. Working on it further wasn't worth the rising blood pressure. Just knowing they were up to something, rather than merely suspecting it, was more than she normally had to go on. Minerva decided that she would just keep a sharper eye on them until they made a mistake and showed their hand.

But when she picked up the sheet Minerva noticed that it was no longer displaying the neatly laid out scathing commentary of her failures. Instead the page was positively covered in hastily scribbled notes. Back and front, it was chocked full of both Andrea and Gabriel's handwriting. Not a single inch of parchment was left unused. It was smudged here and there. A few drops of ink decorated it in odd places.

She could only just contain her whoop of joy at seeing that. She could not, however, stop herself slamming the page back down on her desk in victory.

That was, of course, when she realised what must have broken the enchantment. Minerva pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a very irritated breath. Just leave it to Andrea to use the phrase, 'Merlin's saggy left ball,' as a password. Of course it was something ridiculous and vulgar.

That girl was spending far too much time with her uncle Ryan of late.

Warning Adrien Moran of his daughter's rather disturbing turn of phrase and growing penchant for foul language was another thing she needed to do that week. As she sat down she made a mental not to Floo him that weekend, and hope he wasn't too busy to speak with her about Andrea. A talk between them was long overdue, regardless.

With that decided, she turned her full attention back to the parchment before her. Judging by the sheer volume of notes, the conversation predated her class. The two of them had probably been passing that sheet between them all day.

Not to mind that the entirety of it was in Latin.

But Minerva had been a dab hand at Ancient Ruins in her day. So she knew quite a few handy translation spells. As she applied them to the notes she wondered why Andrea and Gabriel had felt the need to write in Latin. It was a language few people in the school really understood, never mind could have an extended conversation in. She hadn't even known Andrea could read Latin.

It seemed a little nonsensical, especially when they had put protective enchantments on the page.

Minerva thought the phrase was 'overkill'.

When she first began reading, the tone of the passages confused her. It didn't line up with the typical behaviour of either student. Not at all. There was hardly a hint of the intense rivalry that had been inherent in all of their interactions since they got their first piece of homework back. And gotten one hundred percent each - Minerva remembered it very clearly. Mainly because they tried to jinx each other shortly afterwards.

There wasn't even an air of allies planning a heist. Or whatever they called their mischief making.

It was, dare she even think it, playful. Conspiratorial.

They mocked their classmates and Argus Filch quite a bit. And discussed the best strategy to get away with kicking Mrs. Norris.

Minerva was, to say the least, very unimpressed with the subject of their conversation.

She had been aware of the two of them becoming less openly antagonistic towards each other recently. At the time she and Severus had thought it was merely the result of them growing more mature. And hopefully growing out of such behaviour.

They had been quite happy about it. Had seen it as progress. Thought it was something to be celebrated, not worried over.

The staff had all been very glad this more tame attitude to each other resulted in them being less likely to cause explosions, or attempt other forms of sabotage during their classes when they were bored. As far as any of the staff could see, it was definitely for the best.

This opinion was supported by the two of them setting their sights for trouble elsewhere. And instead of hassling each other, they set themselves on anyone who attempted to bully the younger students. Since this was a rather gallant endeavour, Minerva had decided to let them at it for the time being. A decision which was heartily agreed upon by her colleagues.

But she was now concerned they had overlooked something important in their joy at having that headache gone. Minerva was becoming concerned with how friendly the two of them appeared to be. And how comfortable they seemed to be with each other. Which only grew more and more apparent the more of their little missives she read.

It was rather worrying she had completely missed that development.

The further she read into their notes, the further her eyebrows rose. Until they were almost at her hairline. Minerva couldn't prevent her jaw from dropping a little with the shock of what she was reading. She was honestly having trouble believing it.

Taking off her glasses, Minerva rubbed at her eyes. Then put them back on and re-read both sides of the page. Just to be sure she hadn't been reading anything wrong.

It only confirmed her suspicions. There was absolutely no mistaking it.

They weren't being _friendly_.

No, it had gone far beyond that.

They were _flirting_.

In a strange, sort of quarrelsome, kind of way. But the exchange was most definitely amorous.

And the two of them appeared to be much more _intimately_ acquainted than she had ever thought they would be. Or had ever wanted to think about, at all.

And in a way that was very much against several school rules.

In all honesty, she hadn't even considered that Andrea would be dating anybody. The girl hadn't ever seemed interested in doing so in all the years Minerva had known her. If she had ever thought about it, she never would have guessed Andrea would choose Gabriel Bennet, out of all the boys in Hogwarts. But it was obvious they were, in fact, dating. There was no other way to interpret the evidence.

Minerva had tried.

And that was inordinately surprising to Minerva. More so even than the time she discovered that Andrea had tried to punch a dementor in the face. Why, she had no idea. Andrea's own explanation was,

"I dunno, Professor, I panicked."

She should have accepted then that Andrea was a lost cause that she would never understand. No matter how much she tried to wrap her head around her behaviour.

Her surprise at the clandestineness of the affair was partly her fault. She never quite got used to the levels of covertness many of the Slytherin students were capable of. And Gabriel Bennet was far smarter, far more sly, than the majority of them. Which was saying something.

The new information shed a whole new light on their never ending rivalry. Their bickering. One that she didn't want to read too much into.

More importantly, it meant that Andrea was seeing a boy unbeknownst to her father. And Gabriel was seeing a girl without the knowledge of his mother and father. She may not know Mr and Mrs Bennet very well personally, but she was aware they had rather strict rules regarding their children dating. Thanks in chief to a rather memorable encounter with Mr and Mrs Bennet regarding their middle child, Francesca, who was in Minerva's house. When she had been caught in a rather unseemly situation with another Gryffindor girl. Safe to say, they were unhappy with their daughter's behaviour.

She felt safe coming to that conclusion because if any of the Morans knew about the situation, they would have come to her. Probably to ask her to keep an eye on them while they were in the school. By keep an eye on them, they would undoubtedly mean ensure they remain fully clothed under any and all circumstances.

And if Gabriel had volunteered that information to his, quite authoritarian, parents, Minerva would eat her hat.

Andrea and Gabriel had more than enough common sense between them to be aware of exactly how their families would react to the news of their relationship. Andrea would know if her father, aunts, or uncles, found out they would have had all the staff keeping watch over her and her 'sweetheart'.

She also knew that both of them would be capable of keeping up a charade of a clandestine relationship for longer and better than most individuals. Who knows how long they had actually been seeing each other? And then using their very public disagreements as an incredibly effective veil to pull over everyone's eyes. It didn't bare thinking about, how long they may have been deceiving everyone around them.

She was going to inform Severus of this, so they could round up the two right away. And have a very long, very detailed conversation about honesty. And its necessity in functional, healthy relationships - of the familial and romantic variety. It would be a rather uncomfortable experience for everyone involved. But Minerva would rather get everything covered in one sitting. In the end it would be less trouble than trying to pin those two down on multiple occasions.

It was very unlikely they would start listening to her now with regards to paying attention in their classes. Cursing things to insult people. Their frankly terrible language. Or conspiring to commit various acts of rule breaking. But Minerva would continue to try until the day they graduated.

She had some hope, at least, that detailing in no uncertain terms the punishments they would receive if they attempted to kick Mrs. Norris, that warning would be heeded.

As for being found in any ... compromising positions, such as those alluded to in their little love notes. Well. She would tell them exactly what would happen if they were discovered ... And hope that would discourage them from engaging in any more inappropriate activities like that in future.

Minerva grimly folded up the evidence, placed it carefully in her robe pocket, and set out to find Severus, and the two delinquents.

Classes had finished for the day. So they were most likely off doing something nefarious. Experimenting with something dangerous. Or doing something indecent. Whatever it was, Minerva doubted she would be very pleased with them. Their chances of getting detention and/or losing house points were, as always, very high.

Minerva had never shied away from dealing with such situations before. And she didn't intend to begin doing so now. Merlin knew they were not the first pair of passionate teenagers she'd ever had to discipline in her time teaching. Far from it, in fact.

What else would one expect when a bunch of ragingly hormonal young people were kept under one roof. They would persist in such behaviour. It didn't matter how well disciplined they were.

She got through Francesca's rakish little debacle merely a year ago. With relative ease, considering the people she had to deal with - all of them strong-willed and convinced they were in the right. Minerva could and would deal with the little brother's behaviour.

Still, they were a pair of scoundrels. So she prayed to a God she wasn't sure she believed in for patience and strength anyway. And made sure to walk quite a bit more loudly than she normally would whenever she approached what she knew were some of the hiding spots favoured by students looking for that sort of privacy. Just because she knew what was going on didn't mean she had to witness it.


End file.
